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Jameson and NASA Fellows Named

AHA Staff, September 2009

The American Historical Association is pleased to announce the names of the scholars selected to receive the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship (cosponsored by the Library of Congress) and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration Fellowship for research on aerospace history for 2009–10.

The Jameson Fellowship (for research in American history), tenable at the Library of Congress, has been awarded to Jason Stahl.

Jason Stahl received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2008 for research on 20th-century American history. His dissertation, “Selling Conservatism: Think Tanks, Conservative Ideology, and the Undermining of Liberalism, 1945–Present,” investigates the rise and historical development of the conservative think tank as an institution of political and cultural power within the United States. Conservative think tanks—research and public relations institutions, populated by conservative intellectuals—emerged in the postwar period as sites designed for theorizing and “selling” conservative public policies and ideologies, both to lawmakers and the public at large. Stahl demonstrates that think tanks were instrumental in the rise of a broad conservative movement during the postwar period and in the turn away from New Deal liberalism.

The NASA Fellowship (which the AHA administers for NASA) for 2009–10 was awarded to Aaron L. Alcorn.

Alcorn, a cultural historian of American technology, received his PhD from Case Western Reserve University in 2009. His book project on the model airplane hobby charts the shifting perceptions of boyhood, technology, and consumption in the wake of the airplane’s development. His work bridges cultural history and the histories of business, technology, and childhood, and offers a revealing window into the culture of modernity in the first half of the 20th century—a culture defined by machines that moved, cultural attitudes in flux, and an intensifying consumer culture.